I’ve been pondering a post about my recent and less recent failures in the world of craft, but because said failures meant I found myself dejected, it’s been hard to summon energy to talk about them.
But I’m starting to climb back up I think, which gives me just enough oomph to at least manage a pictorial update.
Here is the super Lazy Girl shawl (Ravelry link to the pattern) I knit with the amazing Tracie wool yarn from Imperial yarn and some Noro Kureyon.
I miscalculated the amount of yarn and failed to turn back at the right time, leading to a lopsided shawl for one, 
and secondly, I hadn’t fully grasped the shape of the finished project. It turns out that it doesn’t really suit me – or rather, it does, but in a spectacular / showy, great big collar sort of way where I end up feeling like a throwback to François Premier fashion.
A friend of mine said during our Skype call last week that it was the perfect webcam accessory, since it made it look like I was fabulously dressed in gorgeous handknits in an oh so very French & sophisticated way. You can imagine how hard I laughed at this, I think. :)
Here is the disastrous Paper Crane top I knit last year. I cast it on in the plane to Toronto last year and knit on it happily until it was done. 
Despite all my math (correct, I CHECKED SINCE), this piece turned out both too big (even immense) and deformed, and thus unwearable. I have kept it over a year in that state because I kept hoping I’d find a way to give it funky seams and make it into a wearable, if asymmetric, garment… Thus the odd scrunching in this picture (my latest / last idea was to fashion it into a double sort of scarf+cowl combo), achieved by threading in two strands of contrasting yarn (for testing).
I find myself still reluctant to unravel the Lazy Blue, because the failure is too fresh in my mind – and this even though I enjoyed knitting this yarn so much that I do actively look forward to knitting it again – but I finally hit the moment last week when I was ready to frog the green mistake and put it all behind me.
I think I might use the same yarn to knit a Boe sweater (Ravelry link), whenever I work up the courage to pick up my needles again. Oddly, I haven’t knit a stitch in about a month now… This hadn’t happened to me in a long while.
But let me finish on a more upbeat note, with an old project I recovered today. This is the first scarf I ever knit out of Noro yarn (Silk Garden), a small and easy short rows project. 
I loved it a lot, wore it a winter or two, and then I discovered that it was the perfect sort of twist to wrap around a hay wreath… and even though it was too short to cover the whole thing, I kept it wrapped there for a few years more, until YESTERDAY.
Now it is back around my neck where it belongs… and I think I might knit it a sister in that one skein of Noro Yuzen I keep petting.